I’m an author, journalist and one of the UK’s social media pioneers. Here I write about publishing, self-publishing and crowdfunding.
I am also the author of Argleton, a novelette about a mysterious town that appears on digital maps but doesn’t exist in reality. I self-published via Kickstarter and Amazon Kindle, and am negotiating my way through the publishing world and exploring new business models for entrepreneurial authors along the way.
As a freelance journalist, I have written about social media and technology for FirstPost.com, The Guardian, CIO Magazine and Computer Weekly.

Wildseed Studios Seeks Original Genre Fiction

We’re all familiar with business incubators, but Wildseed Studios are applying the idea to the creative industries, launching a new ‘content and talent’ incubator. They are seeking original sci-fi, fantasy and horror ideas and will be investing up to £10,000 in each of 50 projects over the next few years. The company was founded by Miles Bullough, formerly Aardman Animations’ Head of Broadcast, and Jesse Cleverly, who previously worked at the BBC as a creative executive.

The company is using a model similar to that followed by VC and angel investors in the start-up scene, focusing on great ideas and providing the creative teams behind them with mentoring and support, including marketing and monetisation advice. In addition to sci-fi, fantasy and horror ideas, they are also looking for character-based comedy projects, adult animation and comedies that will appeal to children aged 6 to 11.

Cleverly explained that Wildseed are focused entirely on character, rather than format or platform.

“You start with the story,” Cleverly said, “and the elements within the story then drive your choices around platform. It is an extremely rewarding and surprising simple way of operating.

“When I was buying at the BBC, I would see brilliant high concepts, fantastically designed, beautifully produced, but at the centre of it there was no character that you believed the audience would want to be, or be with. So we start from character, and we believe that unless something has got a stunning character at its centre, a compelling, interesting, unusual, often funny, character, it has a much lower likelihood of turning into one of those fabulous perennials that you see roll and roll across multiple platforms. Character is hugely important.”

Wildseed is platform and format agnostic, so they don’t mind if someone comes to them with an idea for a game, animation, comic, or short film. But it’s also essential to understand how new platforms, such as social media, fit in with the traditional.

“Robert McKee says that a novel is good for inner conflict, a play is good for exploring interpersonal conflict, and a movie is good for exploring conflict between characters in a universe. But what’s a Twitter feed good for? Or a Facebook page? What is the difference between a YouTube channel and a TV station?”

Part of Wildseed’s strategy is to look for the “minimum viable product”, another concept from the tech scene where start-ups being by working on the simplest effective version of their idea so that they can launch and get feedback on it quickly.

“We’ll proceed in a ‘test and roll out’ manner,” said Cleverly, “so we’ll put pilot material in front of an audience, we’ll listen to the conversation happening around that content, we will draw the lessons there are to be learned from it in order to improve.”

Cleverly sees books, and novellas in particular, as a great minimum viable product, a good format to cheaply and effectively test a concept.

“One of the reasons why the movie industry loves books as a way into movies is that a book is a comparatively low cost way of deeply exploring and dramatising a world and a situation. Particularly ebooks, where the cost of production is low. I am very interested in how we might facilitate the creation of vibrant new characters and situations via publishing. Books are a much lower risk platform than, for example, audiovisual, and publishing is an incredibly powerful, interesting and rich way into new worlds and new characters. But I will always be thinking about the universe rather than the incarnation of the universe.”

Wildseed Studios started as a response to two conflicting trends, Cleverly explained:

“If you’re an emerging creator right now, you’ve never had it so easy. You can publish your novel yourself, you can plug into all the self-publishing platforms. That’s an extraordinary thing. But you’ve also never had it so hard, because the infrastructure that surrounded me, for example, when I went into TV, like a career path, training, finance, latitude, bandwidth, courage, are all in retreat in those traditional media industries.”

Cleverly and Bullough saw an opportunity to use seed financing to “make a crucial difference” to emerging creators who may be struggling to do everything themselves on a shoestring budget. They will also be offering strategic advice on how to exploit an idea cross multiple platforms and how to generate revenue.

Although Wildseed is looking for 50 ideas, they say that they need only one to “turn into a breakout hit” for their model to be a success.

“That feels achievable,” said Bullough in a press release, “given our experience, our test and roll out methodology and the amount of talent out there looking for investment and support.”

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